Does God destroy the righteous along with the wicked?

The passages speak of two different things: disasters in this life, which fall on good and bad alike, and each person’s standing before God, which does not.

Job 9:22 and Ecclesiastes 7:15 describe what people see in this world. Job says it in the bitterness of his suffering, and the book does not approve every word he says: God asks, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2), and Job takes back his complaints (42:3–6). Still, what Job saw was real: calamity does not sort people out. The Preacher says the same of life ‘under the sun’.

Ezekiel 21 is about such a disaster. The ‘sword’ is the army of the king of Babylon (21:19), and to be ‘cut off from’ the land meant death in war or exile. In that national catastrophe the righteous suffered too: Ezekiel and Daniel were themselves among the exiles. Ezekiel 18 and 33 answer a different question, raised by the proverb that the children were paying for their fathers’ sins (18:2). Each person stands before God on his own account: the righteous man “shall surely live”, with God’s favour and life, even if he shares the nation’s earthly troubles. Ezekiel 14:14 holds both truths together: had Noah, Daniel and Job been in the land, “they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness”.

So the same sword could fall on both, but not the same judgment. Gill puts it this way: they do not perish for ever together, though they may fall together in temporal calamities, the one being chastised and the other condemned.

How Ezekiel 21:3 fits with Ezekiel 9:4–6, where the faithful in Jerusalem are marked to be spared, is discussed. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take the mark as a pledge of God’s care in the calamity rather than escape from it. The Targum reads 21:3 as God removing the righteous so that he may destroy the wicked, and the Septuagint has ‘the transgressor and unrighteous’ instead of ‘the righteous and the wicked’. Most commentators follow the Hebrew.